Monday, 31 October 2011

With Halloween being tomorrow I thought it would be fun to touch on a mysterious subject related to the outdoor world. The Adirondack region has its share of reported Bigfoot, or Sasquatch, encounters.When Bill Brann decided to investigate what has become the legendary Bigfoot encounters in Whitehall, Washington County, back in 1976, he didn't know then what he was getting himself into. An archaeologist by trade, Brann was intrigued and eventually sought out the parties involved.The incident on Abair Road in late August of that year involved three members of the Gosselin family in Whitehall, two of which were police officers. They reported encountering a large, hairy, muscular creature that walked upright and gave out loud, hideous screams when bright lights were shined in its eyes.

Extract: Since then, some 170 sightings have been reported, the most recent one in 2003 by a man who claims he saw brilliant light moving to the surface and then a creature emerging briefly. When it disappeared again, it left a huge wave that lifted his tiny boat several feet out of the water.

Way back in 1990, an episode of The Simpsons introduced Blinky, a mutated orange fish with three-eyes caught in the waters near the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant, emblematic of mean Mr. Burns' callousness towards the environment -- and now, it seems, life has imitated cartoon. Recently, a group of fisherman on a lake in the Cordoba province of Argentina reeled in a fish that had an extra eye. And it just so happens that that lake is situated right next to a nuclear power plant, too. According to Infobae.com, the lake where the three-eyed fish was caught is a reservoir where hot water from the nuclear facility is pumped, and that folks living nearby have started to grow worried after seeing undeniable evidence of mutation. Never had such a fish been seen there before.

Traces of bone-eating "zombie worms" have been found in a three-million-year-old fossil from Italy, say researchers. Osedax worms feed on whale skeletons on the seabed using root-like tissues to bore into and dissolve the bones. Scientists from the Natural History Museum in London identified telltale borings in the fossil using a scanner. The discovery suggests the worms were much more widespread throughout prehistoric oceans than thought. The findings of lead scientist Nicholas Higgs and colleagues are published in the journal Historical Biology. The only other evidence of Osedax worms in the fossil record was found off the coast of Washington state, US, last year.

Sunday, 30 October 2011

Bridgewater USA and Bridgewater UK, both with bigfoot, big cats etc. what is going on?

Bridgewater is a town in Plymouth County, Massachusetts, United States.. It is named after Bridgwater, Somerset, England. It is also the centre of mysterious goings on from bigfoot to UFOs to ghosts sightings causing it to be dubbed the “Bridgewater Triangle”.
Sightings are numerous in the Bridgewater Triangle. In 1970, reports of a big-foot like, 7-foot tall hairy monster and its footprints instigated both the Bridgewater and Massachusetts State Police canine unit to conduct a search for a bear. However, neither man nor bear was ever found.In 1978, paranormal researcher Joseph M. DeAndrade claims to have observed another such creature as it slowly walked into the brush of the Hockomock Swamp, about 200 yards from his location. He chronicled his sighting in his 1997 book, Passing Strange: True Tales of New England Hauntings and Horrors8.Not all of the creatures that allegedly inhabit the Bridgewater Triangle are land-bound. Since 1971, several sightings of phenomenally large, black birds, with wingspans that stretched from eight to twelve feet, have been reported as well. Coincidentally, the first of these reports originated from Bird Hill in Hockomock Swamp. In 1984, two of these avian creatures were allegedly seen fighting in mid-air.
Source :http://www.paranormal-encyclopedia.com/b/bridgewater-triangle/
And from the BFRO;

OBSERVED: Footprints in the snow, walking through several properties and into the woods. Seen by myself, a Federal Agent for 16 years, my cousin the homeowner/poreprty owner), and several other family members. Tracks went through a neighborhood and from trash can to trash can.

ALSO NOTICED: The toes of the footprints penetrated under the snow about an inch, indicating the track was made by a foot with a forward momentum walking up the hill.

OTHER WITNESSES: Several family members. The prints were first discovered by my cousin's daughter in their back yard. She had heard bigfoot stories from me because I am a hobby cryptozoologist. She showed them to her dad and he called me and several other family members. Several pictures were taken by my cousine and myself.

TIME AND CONDITIONS: Daylight, Bright sun. The tracks were possibly made on Saturday the 24th at night. My cousin noted his outdoor cats were inside and acting very frightened.

ENVIRONMENT: Suburban backyard surrounded by extensive natural areas. Several of the kids have been through the yard because they are excited about the tracks, but we have tried to preserve them. See the full report and follow up here:

It got me thinking is it something to do with the name? Bridgewater in England ,after whom the MA town is named , is also surrounded by mysterious goings on. From ghosts and ghoulies to big cats and UFO sightings. See a selection here:

So could the name of a place produce expectations in those living or visiting the area that influences what they might see? Or does the name attract a certain sort of person to the area that would pick up on the vibes and see things others may not? It is certainly strange that both areas should be subject to people seeing fortean phenomena and strange beasties.

Saturday, 29 October 2011

As All Hallows Eve approachs...Do Vampires Exist?

This is not really cryptozoological but a bit of fun for Halloween.The Scientists argue do vampires exist?

Physics proves horror movies get it wrong

Judy Skatssoon ABC Science Online Tuesday, 29 August 2006

You can put away the garlic. The principle of geometric progression has just debunked the myth of vampires .Who needs ghostbusters when you've got Newton, says a scientist who has used physics and maths to poke holes in the way Hollywood depicts ghosts and vampires.In a paper, published recently on the physics website arXiv, theoretical physicist Professor Costas Efthimiou of the University of Central Florida shows that when it comes to things supernatural, the figures just don't add up.For instance, the ability to walk through walls is a common talent of celluloid ghosts. But Newton's laws of physics suggest that if a ghost can walk it shouldn't be able to pass through walls, say Efthimiou and Cornell University postgraduate student Sohan Gandhi.Newton says a body at rest will remain at rest until it's acted on by an external force and for every action there is an equal but opposite reaction. So in order to walk, we apply a backward force on the floor with our feet, propelling the feet up and us forwards. But if a ghost can walk through walls, it must be "material-less", the authors argue, and incapable of exerting force. By the same token, a ghost that can walk through walls should also sink through the floor, and a ghost that can walk should be bouncing off the walls it tries to pass through ."The depiction of ghosts walking contradicts the precept that ghosts are material-less," they write. Sharp drops in temperature are also associated with the arrival of a ghost. But the paper says physics, which suggests that a sense of cold is correlated more to the rate at which heat is transferred from bodies to the environment than actual temperature, can provide an explanation. What do you mean Newton says we can't walk through walls? ."It has become almost a Hollywood cliché that the entrance of a ghostly presence be foreshadowed by a sudden and overwhelming chill," they write. "This feature of supposed ghost sightings lends itself naturally to physical explanation." Efthimiou and Gandhi say when a warm object is placed next to a cold object, energy flows from the warm body to the cooler body, cooling the warm body. In a room with a high window or a door with a gap, the cool air from outside displaces warm air inside, creating a system of heat cycles and eddies. The effect is increased because humans are more sensitive to rapid changes in temperature even if the absolute change is small. A 2001 UK investigation of the famous Haunted Gallery at Hampton Court, by the University of Hertfordshire's Dr Richard Wiseman, found that hidden doors were letting in draughts. This produced a combination of air currents that caused temperatures to plummet up to 2°C in some parts, the paper says. Efthimiou and Gandhi also use the mathematical principle of geometric progression to rule out the existence of vampires. They argue it would take just two and a half years for vampires to wipe out the entire human race from the day the first one appeared, based on the myth that vampires turn their victims into other vampires by sucking their blood. If vampires feed once a month, the great grandaddy of all vampires would have killed one human and produced one vampire in the first month. So in total there would be two vampires and one less human, or a tally of vampires 2, humans -1. By the next month, the 2 vampires would kill 2 humans, and so on. After n months there would be 2 x 2 x 2 ... x 2 = 2n, or a geometric progression with ratio 2."The vampire population increases geometrically and the human population decreases geometrically," they say.Using the principle of reductio ad absurdum, they conclude that vampires can't exist as their existence contradicts the existence of humans. Professor Alan Carey, dean of the Mathematical Sciences Institute at the Australian National University, says the paper successfully debunks the depictions of the supernatural in the movies. "They poke holes in the clichés and mistakes that are made, and that's not too hard to do," he says.

A SKELETON exhumed from a grave in Venice is being claimed as the first known example of the "vampires" widely referred to in contemporary documents. Matteo Borrini of the University of Florence in Italy found the skeleton of a woman with a small brick in her mouth (see right) while excavating mass graves of plague victims from the Middle Ages on Lazzaretto Nuovo Island in Venice .At the time the woman died, many people believed that the plague was spread by "vampires" which, rather than drinking people's blood, spread disease by chewing on their shrouds after dying. Grave-diggers put bricks in the mouths of suspected vampires to stop them doing this, Borrini says.The belief in vampires probably arose because blood is sometimes expelled from the mouths of the dead, causing the shroud to sink inwards and tear. Borrini, who presented his findings at a meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences in Denver, Colorado, last week, claims this might be the first such vampire to have been forensically examined. The skeleton was removed from a mass grave of victims of the Venetian plague of 1576.However, Peer Moore-Jansen of Wichita State University in Kansas says he has found similar skeletons in Poland and that while Borrini's finding is exciting, "claiming it as the first vampire is a little ridiculous". Borrini says his study details the earliest grave to show archaeological "exorcism evidence against vampires".

The Russian Academy of Sciences has said it is highly likely that the Bigfoot really exists. Experts came to the conclusion after carrying out a microscopic analysis of hairs believed to belong to the yeti found in the Kuzbass region of Siberia. ­In early October, professors from the USA, Canada, Sweden, Estonia and Russia came to the Kuzbass region to look for evidence that would prove the existence of the Bigfoot. The trip was not in vain – footprints apparently belonging to the yeti were found dotted all over the inside of the Azass cave where the creature is thought to live. The follicular evidence was found stuck to a huge footprint on the cave’s clay floor. Professors from Moscow, St. Petersburg and Idaho Universities got themselves a couple of precious hairs each to do the necessary research. The hairs turned out to be identical to ones that allegedly belonged to a Californian yeti, another from the Russian Urals and a third from the Leningrad region, writes Komsomolskaya Pravda.The first to make the fantastic discovery was Professor Valentin Sapunov, a member of the New York Academy, St. Petersburg Scientific University – a geneticist and biophysicist.“In St. Petersburg the hairs were examined through a special microscope,” said Valentin Sapunov. “This is a complicated, but a very efficient method. The hairs were sprayed with a chemical composition, and then various slices of the hairs were examined. This gave us an opportunity to draw comparisons between the hairs of different biological species,” the professor explained.
When the tests were finished, the hairs found at the Azass cave were compared to those brought from California, the Russian Urals and the Leningrad region. “And they all proved to belong to one and the same species! The research of our American counterparts showed the same,” said Sapunov with ill-concealed excitement.

Growing up on the prairies, the oldest daughter of a dad who liked to hunt, Cindy Dosen learned plenty about hunting and animal behaviour.But what happened to her four and a half years ago, an incident that changed her life, was unlike anything she witnessed during those years."Having that experience [hunting] really prepared me for going out in the woods," said Dosen. "But it did not prepare me for what I heard that day."It was around 12: 45 p.m. on April 2, 2007, and Dosen was taking photographs near Maple Mountain of tree structures that resembled bigfoot evidence she had previously seen online. Suddenly, a group of deer ran past on a game trail, clearly fleeing something - Dosen suspected a cougar.When she emerged onto the road, she could see a dark shadow, and took off running back to where she had parked. The creature she had spotted repeatedly let out a "yell/scream/roar" - she later came close to duplicating the noise online by combining the sound of a mountain gorilla and an African lion - and followed her, about 20 metres behind, she suspects, breaking trees and pushing bushes over, until she got to her car."It's like it was herding me along," she recalled.Dosen drove home to Duncan, walked in the door and started crying, bewildered as to what had just happened.

In the annals of science fiction, humans and non-avian dinosaurs have been brought together in a variety of ways. Genetic engineering experiments and time travel are probably the most common these days, but I have always had a soft spot for tales of “lost worlds.” What could be more fantastic than dinosaurs that somehow escaped extinction and persisted in some isolated spot for 65 million years? My childhood self really wanted someone to find a living Tyrannosaurus, Apatosaurus, or Triceratops in some remote locale, and that wish was fed by reports that one elusive dinosaur was hiding in Africa.
First thing first—living dinosaurs certainly do exist. We know them as birds, and a combination of fossil discoveries and laboratory research has confirmed the evolutionary connection between birds and feather-covered maniraptoran dinosaurs. But from time to time, people have proposed that non-avian dinosaurs may also still be hanging around.
Read rest here: http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/dinosaur/2011/10/living-sauropods-no-way/

He's called the national capital home for a while, but doesn't like to stay in one place for too long. Hence Tim the Yowie Manis forever popping up all over Canberra and the surrounding bush, chasing down tales - tall or otherwise.666 ABC Canberra managed to hold him in one place for long enough to get him to agree to presenting A Month of Sundays, every Sunday during October - and of course he's a regular with Ross Solly on Breakfast.

Japanese knotweed forced its way into the couple's Broxbourne home The price of a couple's Hertfordshire house has dropped by more than £250,000 because Japanese knotweed has invaded it, according to an independent surveyor.With its value falling from an estimated £305,000 to £50,000, experts have told owners Matthew Jones and Sue Banks from Broxbourne that, unless action is taken, it will be impossible to sell.They have been told 10ft (3m) of soil needs to be removed from beneath the foundations to remove the plant.The invasive weed was discovered in the garden of their new-build house in April 2009 after they had been living there for about a month.A couple of months later it was found growing in the dining room.

The Weird Helmet

The Weird Shield

Dark Esk

Dark Wear

Dark Ness

Dark Ness by Tabitca Cope

New book on kindle- myths, murder, monsters and magic in modern day Loch Ness

New Cryptofiction book out

mysterious creatures roam the countryside,what is the secret of the horror tunnel and what are the modern day witches up to with the fifth reich? our Friends from the book Dark Ness once again meet cryptids and danger . s

About Me

Mother, author, cat lover, amateur cryptozoologist, cook and bottle washer, some times lover, single parent,middle aged,a mad woman without an attic, red wine and chocolate lover.Now housebound due to ill health so an armchair researcher.Too wheezy to sit in a hide and watch for cryptids anymore lol.Have now taken up crafting when I feel able.I now have a Fiction book out on amazon Kindle Dark Ness by Tabitca Cope set in, you guessed it, Loch Ness with monsters , murder , myth and magic.